A quick post on VP vs. KP in response to MBrandt

 
For some reason Stelek and Mike Brandt thinks that the debate is over in the VPs over KP since they posted on their blogs why they think that Victory Points are a better way of determining wins/losses than Kill Points are.


 
I will post why I think that KP are superior to VPs at a future date, and I will look up their posts to see what there arguments are, and why they favor VPs. I will take a good look at them and break down the VPs vs. KP, but for now I will talk about Mike Brandt's post found here:

http://www.yesthetruthhurts.com/2010/09/part-i-balanced-scenarios-vs-unbalanced.html
 
Mikes comments in Green, and mine in Purple:


Mike Brandt; mvbrandt@gmail said...

I really, really don't understand WHY people feel KP, and emphasizing giant crap units that fail miserably at most missions but can in theory "cheese" KP wins, is a good thing.

   

I wonder why you think that giant units are "Crap" units? Let's take a look at Thunder Wolf Cavalry, are you trying to say that they are a crap unit? Nob Bikers? Sanguinary Guard? Seer Councils? (I could do this all night). There are a lot of expensive and small units that are anything but crap.

On the other side of the coin I could reverse this and say I wonder why you think that taking a lot of crap units that fail miserably at most missions other than Seize Ground is a good thing?

Restated, why would anyone WANT to encourage that kind of play? It sells less models, encourages (bad) list building techniques and tactics, and is generally disliked as much as liked.

I did not realize that tournament organizers are part of the marketing arm of GW to sell more models. Not only that, as I stated before you can play any MEQ army and make it another MEQ army no purchase necessary! Again, at the Nova Open you had a blue crimson fist army as blood angels, going against a red chaos army that was space wolves.

Since when does not building a MSU army constitute bad list building? There are many ways to win this game with many build of armies out of all of the codexes. Why is MSU the only acceptable build? And tactics? Are you kidding me? If you think that tactics constitutes rolling dice for your long fang missile launchers, and your razorbacks? Yes, that is some tactics! Try winning with a small elite army, and you will learn a ton of tactics. Try doing a lot more with a lot less, and you will learn to play the game much better than determining who will win the game by who wins the dice roll to go first.  

Ours can't be the ONLY part of the country where just about everyone, when rolling KP randomly for a pick-up game, shrugs and re-rolls. Every 40k rulebook edition has that shitty mission or two ... like Alpha level missions in general in the 4E book. Why the obscene angry attachment to KP?

I can ask you why the hatred of KP? There are a lot of areas that hate a lot of things. There are areas that are still playing 2^nd edition 40k, does that make it the better game? There are people out there that fear change, and refuse to do it. There are others out there that find that certain missions do not give their armies and builds an advantage and they pressure people into dropping them. There are people (like me) that hate Dawn of War, but it is part of the game and I have to adapt or lose no matter what my personal preference is.

 

By the by, MSU takes advantage of the 5x5, which reverses the aim of KP. You have a MUCH easier time "hiding" or reserve-hiding the units nominated when you've got redundancy and tons more units. Someone with a 10 KP army can't really "hide" half his force and expect not to get tabled, whereas someone with 25 KP can much more readily suppress the use of / hide / reserve 5 of the 25. It's kind of an obvious thing, and plays out in-game over and over. I'm not even saying it's bad, but it certainly does the opposite of KP (which is reward low-KP armies and punish MSU spam).

             
            I agree the 5x5 kill point model still does not even the playing field for small KP armies.

So to sum up: I am not averse to modifying the basic missions, but a lot of the alternatives reward MSU armies, and punish small elite armies. There needs to be balance in the game and you can't reward one type of build over another.

  

How balanced missions should work:

In one example someone talked dismissively about is a 4 land raider army. If you took a 4 LR army against an 8 razorback spam army (You can throw in some long fangs too) I don't see why only the LR army should be at a huge disadvantage in both the objective missions and VP missions. The 4 LRs might be able to win in a strait up shoot out with the 8 RB, but there is no way that they can play whack-a-mole to kill all of those units. So in a perfect world with both KPs and objectives, the LR player says that they need to diversify their army more to win objective based missions, and the razorback spam army says to himself that he needs to consolidate his army more to make it durable for KP missions and in the end both of their armies are not on the extremes. The way it stands now with VPs and Table Quarter missions, the impetus is only coming from one side to get the LR army to diversify and not the MSU army to consolidate.